It IS hard to know how you could mislay £25million.

That’s the sum Patricia Cornwell, the best-selling US crime writer, says went missing while a firmcalled Anchin, Block & Anchin was meant to be managing her finances.

She is now suing them for £62million, claiming it blew her fortune on risky investments andunnecessary taxes.

It counters that she is an impulsive spender who frittered her earnings with a £25,000-a-month lease on an apartment in New York’s Trump Tower, £3million on a private jet service, a similar sum on a personal helicopter and £7million on properties outside New York.

She was also paying a staggering £25,000 as a monthly retainer to the firm in addition to hourly charges for services including taking her clothes for alteration and arranging care for her mother.

Having her finances exposed in a public battle must be humiliating for someone who is obsessive about privacy but it is only the latest episode in a bizarre life.

A descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she was born Patricia Daniels in Miami in 1956.

Her father walked out on Christmas Day when she was five and she and her brothers were taken to live in North Carolina by their mother.

She was befriended by Ruth Graham, wife of the evangelist Billy, who encouraged her to write.

At college she fell in love with one of her teachers, Charles Cornwell. Their marriage foundered partly as a result of their 17-year age gap but after their divorce they remained friends and he became her editor.

She started her working life compiling TV listings for The Charlotte Observer. She eventually became a reporter and moved to the crime desk but she was set on becoming a crime writer and left journalism for an administrative job at the pathologist’s office in Virginia.

That gave her the background knowledge for the character of Dr Kay Scarpetta, a chief medical examiner who uses science and intuition to solve grisly murders.

She was the heroine of Cornwell’s first published novel Postmortem and of 19 subsequent ones. By the late Nineties she was earning multi-million dollar advances and had three homes in the US, travelling between them in her own helicopter.

Whereas many popular writers are able to enjoy relatively anonymous lives, Cornwell’s was anything but.

Suffering from bi-polar depression, she was capable of spending £30,000 on clothes in her manic phases. She turned her Mercedes over three times while drunk-driving and was sentenced to 28 days in a treatment centre.

Whereas many popular writers are able to enjoy relatively anonymous lives, Cornwell’s was anything but.

She has also suffered from bulimia and anorexia.

She suffered the full glare of publicity when she had an affair with FBI agent Margo Bennett. Bennett’s enraged husband had a shoot-out with Margo and was jailed for attempted murder.

She also fought a long battle against an online stalker who had accused her of plagiarising a self-published novel. She sued and won whereupon he set up a website accusing her of murder, neo-Nazism, anti-semitism and killing his cat. She sued and won again.

Cornwell befriended George Bush senior but was angrily opposed to his son’s invasion of Iraq.

“I was supportive of young George Bush because I liked his family,” she said. “I thought he was going to be another Big George. Boy, was I ever wrong. It’s not a democracy so much as a theocracy.”

She was ready to leave the US if John McCain won the presidential election in 2008.

However her greatest controversy came when she spent £2million on works by Walter Sickert, one of the greatest British painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in a bid to prove that he was Jack The Ripper.

Publishing an account of her sleuthing titled Portrait Of A Killer, she pronounced herself “100 per cent certain” Sickert was the murderer.

Although reports that she had slashed a painting in her quest for his DNA turned out to be wrong the book was widely ridiculed.

Sickert’s most respected biographer commented: “In her desire to find answers she simply hasn’t followed very sound principles of investigation. It is a nonsensical misreading of the facts.”

Now she finds herself in the firing line once more as she and her spouse Staci Gruber, a Harvard neuroscientist, are accused of blowing cash on an epic scale.

“Where did the money go?” the lawyer for Anchin, Block & Anchin asked in court. “Ms Cornwell and Dr Gruber spent the money. You have to consider the large lifestyles involved, the spending habits, impulsive buying.”

They deny it and say the firm abused her trust. They claim a principal in the firm wrote a £3,000 cheque with her money as a bat mitzvah present for his daughter.

The case is expected to last a month and you can expect a lot more charge and counter-charge.

As with everything in Cornwell’s rollercoaster life there is unlikely to be a dull moment.

Did cornwell solve the ripper case?

WALTER SICKERT had been linked to one far-fetched theory in the Jack The Ripper case as an unwitting accomplice to a conspiracy to cover up for Queen Victoria’s grandson but Cornwell went further and said the painter himself was the killer.

Cornwell’s suspicion was based on his fascination with the murders, plus a series of paintings with an apparent similarity to the autopsy pictures of the victims.

She also found a watermark on stationery used by Sickert that was the same as that on a letter claiming to be from The Ripper.

She bought 32 Sickert canvases and the painter’s desk to test for DNA. None was found.

She then paid for tests on The Ripper letters and Sickert’s correspondence.

She found the weakest of links, equivalent to having a similar blood group, which simply meant he could have written the letters.

But they were also contaminated after 100 years of handling. Sickert’s motive, she claimed, was a deformity that made him impotent and thus hate women but the painter’s biographer says Sickert fathered a child and was in France for a large part of the murder period.

If that alibi was reliable Sickert could not have been the killer but even without it Cornwell’s “100 per cent certainty” of his guilt was by any forensic standard preposterous.